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December 8, 2019 - February 10, 2020
Instead of asking ourselves, “What is wrong with these young people?” we need to rephrase our question and ask, “What happened to these young people?”
These toxic levels of stress in these students need to be understood in the context of how the body’s stress response system works. Within this system, there are three broad categories of stress—not all of which, of course, are bad—that make up our stress response system: “positive stress,” “tolerable stress,” and “toxic stress.”
The highest level of the human stress response system is toxic stress. This type of stress is triggered when a child is exposed to ongoing elevated levels of adversity, oftentimes unpredictable.
To help create circuits of resiliency and well-being, we feel it is critical to reach students at a young age when the brain has its greatest plasticity and malleability.
“Love her, care, give hope, and do anything she needs.” She
1) emotional abuse; 2) physical abuse; 3) sexual abuse; 4) physical neglect; 5) emotional neglect; 6) substance abuse in the household; 7) mental illness in the household; 8) mother treated violently; 9) divorce or parental separation; and 10) a household member in jail.
five hidden wounds of racial trauma, including: 1) internalized devaluation; 2) assaulted sense of self; 3) internalized voicelessness; 4) the wound of rage; and 5) the sense of being a nobody.
They live in the here and now where zero tolerance policies, added security in schools, and armed teachers are not working. They are pleading for increased mental health services, restorative justice programs, and work-funded mental health resources and support. They are exhausted from the profiling and criminalizing of their black and brown brothers and sisters. Many of our young people have experienced the intimate
Trauma arises from an inescapable stressful event that overwhelms an individual’s coping mechanisms.
complex trauma occurs when a young person experiences “multiple, chronic, and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events, most often of an interpersonal nature...and with early life onset.”
A traumatized brain can be tired, hungry, worried, rejected, or detached, and these states are often accompanied by feelings of isolation, shame, worry, angst, and fear.
because educators spend time with students each day. But unless we are mentored and trained in the brain science of adversity and trauma, we will continue to cycle in negative patterns, escalating conflict and aggression
When we are constantly attuning to negative emotion, co-regulating students who are agitated, buffering triggered children and adolescents, and resetting boundaries with challenging behaviors and emotions from others, we often carry these worries into our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
Staying connected and regulated through a conflict is at the core of educator and parent well-being.
“Exhaustion peppered with hopelessness,” is an apt description of how those working with our students feel emotionally. To repeat a common refrain, it seems impossible to teach a student the mandated academic standards when the student’s brain is wired for survival, meaning they are prepared to protect, defend, flee, and fight the minute they walk into the school.
“kids in stress create in us their feelings, and if we are not trained to this process, we (the adult) will mirror their behaviors.”20 Long also argues that when a student is stressed, his or her emotions will also reflect in the adult. If the adult is not trained to accept their own counter-aggressive feelings, the adult will act on them, in effect mirroring the student’s behavior. He offers several reasons that adults become counter aggressive with the young people they serve.
“As adults working with young people,” he continues, “we need to be aware of our own triggers. As we gain more insight into our own behavior it opens up space for us to be able to consciously and intentionally choose how we react to the young people that we serve.21
“Faced with a range of challenging behaviors, caregivers have a tendency to deal with their frustration by retaliating in ways that often uncannily repeat the children’s early trauma.”
What do I need? What can my class do to assist me? What can my teachers
How do I handle this negative situation? Who are my heroes? What character traits do I admire in these individuals? How will I know when I am on the right track? What are three positive emotions that I often feel? What are three negative emotions? What are my strengths? What are two or three challenges or obstacles that prevent me from reaching these small or large goals?
What could be two or three new coping strategies? How could these new shifts fold into my everyday life? What old habits or practices can I begin to leave behind in gradual ways? How will I hold myself accountable for this new perspective, coping strategy, and self-care exercise? Are there two or three words I can begin saying to myself as a reminder I am in new territory and a new time?
Educator stress at the end a semester or school year intermingles with student stress.
Breathe. Take five to ten deep breaths, tracing your hand with a pen until you feel the negative emotion lessen just a little.
Take a walk and notice three colors, sounds, and textures, spending two minutes focused on these experiences or sensations. Run your hands under warm water, massaging them as you feel the warmth of the water coating and rinsing your hands free of tightness. Laugh. Doodle. Compliment yourself.
Check in with your family or friends to see how they are doing, or to share a moment of encouragement. Nothing is more uplifting than when we serve each other, even in our moments of exasperation. Exercise with the help of a YouTube video, or simply create a five-minute routine where you move your body through stretching, walking, or self-massage, focusing on your hands and neck. By using your phone, record your frustrations, anger, and anxieties. When no one is around, and your mind is full,
have an honest talk with yourself. Share your feelings, the reasons, and the experiences from the angst and anxiety (even without recording). Having that conversation with ourselves can be beneficial in regulating our own stress response systems. As Dr. Dan Seigel makes clear, what is bearable is shareable, and what we can name, we can tame.25 Listen to music. Enjoy a snack or a hot drink, like a cup of coffee or tea.
Teachers and students interact and learn from one another in ways that cannot be understood only by examining the cold cognitive aspects of academic skills.
To develop and strengthen cognition in our young people, we must begin at a student’s level of brain development. In this window in time, understanding brain development is critical in helping us teach to the neurodiversity of our students.
We do not really “see” the young people seated before us. Rather than ask what is wrong with these kids, we need to ask instead: What happened to them? What is their story?
No matter our fabulous lesson plans, curriculum designs, and enthusiasm for the academic content, we cannot change the brain states of our students by ignoring what student behaviors are communicating to us each day. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) change the architecture of the brain, triggering inflammation in both the brain and body.
The brain is a social and historical organ and it implicitly remembers experiences innately creating a memory template that holds these early life events, emotions, and visual images.29
The language of the brain stem is sensation, and if sensations such as discomfort, hunger, touch, and exaggerated emotional responses are not buffered or attuned to in those first few months or years of life, the child or adolescent may need to re-experience those critical earlier missed developmental steps and skills that occur in the brain
stem, such as rhythm, movement, and sensory regulation.
If the sensory systems are not developing sufficiently, behavior, emotional regulation, and learning are negatively affected.
Because the brain develops from the bottom up—from the brain stem to the limbic system and then to the cortex—children and adolescents who have been affected by chronic adversity may enter our classrooms with varying levels of brain development.
When we feel distress, our brains and bodies prioritize survival, and we concentrate on the emotional messages flooding our brains and bodies, all of which trigger the question, “Am I safe?” We react physiologically with an irritated limbic system that increases blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration. Chronic activation of the fear response produces high levels of cortisol, which can even damage brain cells responsible for cognition and learning.
When stressed students get angry or shut down, they do not hear our words. In the heat of the moment, for example, explaining a disciplinary procedure to a student or making them reflect on their actions in the heat of the moment IS NOT a good time to ask students to reflect. In
Children and adolescents with histories of neglect, abuse, and violence are constantly concentrating on tones of voice, facial expressions, and movements of others, constantly staying alert for danger. Unfortunately, any information not associated with danger is ignored and dismissed.33
“In 2015, about 3 million teens ages 12 to 17 experienced at least one major depressive episode in the past year,” and “More than 2 million [teens] report experiencing depression that impairs their daily function. About 30% of girls and 20% of boys–totaling 6.3 million teens have had an anxiety disorder….”36
The second greatest time of brain development, however, occurs during the early adolescent years. During this time, the brain reorganizes, and there is a proliferation of new neural synapses that are soon consolidated. This process produces a great deal of emotional instability as older neuronal connections lose out to new ones, in effect creating room for the new specialized skills a young person will need during this time of brain growth.
As young people grow into these new responsibilities during their personal development, teachers and administrators need to create classroom cultures and relationships that promote creativity, autonomy, and positive social interactions. It
when our stress response systems are in good working order, they can save our lives; but if they are out of balance, they can also shorten our lives.
We now know that environments, events, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts can all affect how a gene will be positively or negatively affected.
Yehuda argues that children of mothers who have significant PTSD are three times more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than children in the control groups.
Around three million children in the United States live in families trying to survive on two dollars a day for each family member. Our child poverty rate rivals some of the world’s poorest countries.49
The survey results are not too surprising, in that they show that childhood ACEs increase as a child grows older and decrease as family income rises. Nevertheless, ACEs are still experienced by more than one in three children under the age of six. Even in higher income families, more than one in four children have ACEs.52 ACEs, however, can also be found in community environments,
“externalizers” see the world this way: “I do what I have to do, even if it hurts others. I have to take care of Number One. I have a reputation to maintain and I won’t be disrespected. I have no need to change.” These patterns, importantly, are not conscious in these young people. These children and adolescents are functioning from lower brain regions that chronically activate the fight/flight response. To change their surface behaviors will require interventions that work to change their unconscious patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior. We need to provide patterned repetitive
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“Internalizers,” in Long’s and Fescer’s framework, have internalized their traumatic stress. These young people get angry in schools, but when they settle down, they tend to end up blaming themselves for something else that went wrong in their lives. They act out impulsively but feel bad afterward. These young people are at high risk of drug and alcohol use, and they can be students who harm themselves, are depressed, and are anxious. These young people, though, are also in pain. According to Long and Fecser, these students can be described as “Kids who internalize their anger tend to take
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Students with disabilities were more than twice as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions as students without disabilities. African-American K-12 students were 3.8 times as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions as white students. African-American students were 2.2 times as likely to receive a referral to law enforcement or be subject to a school-related arrest as were white students. American Indian or Alaska Native, Latino, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and multiracial boys were also disproportionately suspended from school, representing 15 percent of K-12 students but
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Where do these stats cone from? Where is thebdta that shows studennts in more thnn one category.
This, however, will require school systems to move beyond becoming only “trauma informed” toward becoming “trauma- and adversity-responsive” with brain-aligned strategies that build attachments and enhance the skills of emotional regulation.
